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Metaphorical concepts
So it seems that how we think, act and speak is influenced by the metaphorical choices we use to conceptualise ideas. Another eye-opener in week 6, this time from Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1980). As someone who resorts to metaphors quite often in language (in my on-going battle to articulate myself with clarity), it…
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Cousin, G. (2005) musings
Week 6 of IDEL and I think we’re moving into more familiar territory. Although digital environments is a very broad term, and Minecraft is still very much an unknown, we’ve begun to start using terms such as VLE, which is a bit closer to home. Cousin, G. (2005) has been a really interesting read, and…
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Themes and terminology
In the spirit of IDEL, I thought it was about time to start experimenting on this blog with a few different online tools. I’ve pulled some of the recurring themes and new terminology (for me) that I’ve picked up during the course so far and pulled them into a wordcloud. It’s not hugely different from…
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The challenge in choice of terminology
Bayne, S. (2015). intertwines with similar themes as the paper I critiqued, namely Hamilton, E., and Friesen, N. (2013). While Friesen looks at the approaches to research in the relationship between technology and education, Bayne raises some another difficulty (and one that could be argued that contributes to the same blinkered viewpoint) in the term…
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Skype chat – a reflection
Today I hit a bit of a dip. I’m sure it happens to most participants at some stage, but all of a sudden the reality of what I’ve got myself into dawned on me. After struggling but persevering through the readings from week 2 (some of them I found more accessible than others, namely the Gert…
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The automated teaching assistant aka ‘teacherbot’
The developing potential in it was clear to see in Sian Bayne’s paper (Bayne S. (2015) Teacherbot: interventions in automated teaching. Teaching in Higher Education. 20(4):455-467) on the ‘teacherbot’ developed by a team at the University of Edinburgh, and used in an earlier MOOC. The twitterbot examples we’d found as a collective were by their very nature…
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Twitterbots – something more than just scale
I’ve got to admit, I’d always assumed twitterbots were just the platform’s version of spam. I’ve used twitter fairly regularly over the past 2-3 years so, while no expert, would assume I’m one of their more savvy users. Sure, I’d had the occasional tweet from a ‘bimbot’, but assumed bots were being used for little…
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Week 1 takeaways
So week 1 is already over! Wow that went quick. The case studies on ‘constructing community’ have provoked some real food for thought, particularly given the polarised situations in the examples. A few key points and thoughts from the first week: Whether the student environment is online or offline, the complexity of community doesn’t really…
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Feeling swamped – MOOC perspectives
We’ve been posed some very interesting scenarios this week on the topic of ‘constructing community’, and it’s been fascinating to read the different takes from fellow students on these on the forums. I was particularly intrigued by some of the points raised about the sense of feeling ‘swamped’ in a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course)…
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Constructing community and the workplace
Week 1 on the IDEL course is all about ‘constructing community’. Naturally the discussions around this will help us forge our own community as part of the course. This is one of the key reasons why I embarked on the MSc, it’s very much ‘learning by doing’. I think one of the key things to…